Language Learners' Extrapolation of Word Order in Micro‐Artificial Languages*

Abstract

This article is concerned with the ability of language learners to extrapolate from the word order in one type of phrase to that in another, namely from the order in the verb phrase (VP) to the orders in the prepositional (PP) and noun phrases (NP) and from the verb phrase order plus either the prepositional‐phrase order or the noun‐phrase order to the other phrase type. Such extrapolation relates both to the implicational universals of possible word orders in language described by Hawkins (1983) and to the head parameter of Government/Binding Theory (Chomsky, 1986a, 1986b, 1988). This article describes an experiment with eight Micro‐Artificial Languages (MALs) that tested the ability of 409 secondary‐school children to extrapolate in this way. The results showed that most learners (340) were highly consistent in ascribing word order and most (321) succeeded in learning the MALs. Four extrapolation strategies followed by the learners that are not covered by the syntactic analyses mentioned are preferences for (1) postpositions, whatever the VP order; (2) adjectives in the same position as objects in the VP; (3) prepositions the same side as adjectives in the NP and objects in the VP; and (4) adjectives before nouns if the VP order and the NP order are consistent. Further research is needed to see if such extrapolation strategies occur in real learning or if they are an artefact of the MAL approach.